The final two weeks of the election were frenzied. The media, the corporations and the labor bosses all threw their support to the Democratic or to the Republican candidate. Their two candidates were running neck-and-neck, virtually deadlocked …for second place. Dora Schmiegal, the write-in, retired elementary school teacher was in the lead and at least seven percentage points ahead of the pack. For although the captains of industry and the leaders of labor aligned themselves with the establishment candidates, the actual white collar and blue collar and agricultural workers and most of the ordinary citizens of the state fell in, instead, with the Schmiegal-Eagles.

The hatchet men were set loose to dig up whatever they could on Dora Schmiegal. But all they could find smelled like roses. Her records were so clean, so boringly clean. Her only skeleton was under her skin. Her only blemishes were old age liver spots. She had no living family and no close friends who they could uncover and plumb for dirt. Her income tax records were spotless. Even Mrs. Schmiegal's divorced lawyer-neighbor who lived in the studio apartment on the same floor where she lived knew little about her, except that she was quiet and odd. He was astonished to learn she had become a multi-millionaire by investing her retirement funds. He was astonished to realize that she was a declared candidate, indeed the leading candidate for the United States Senate from New York. And neither he nor anyone else knew enough about Mrs. Schmiegal to give her opponents any insight into how to derail her campaign.

Nevertheless, the newspaper editorials ripped into her. They portrayed Mrs. Schmiegal as a nouveau riche dilettante, a meddlesome senior citizen, a political hobbyist, a spoiler, a joke, a cartoon of a character, a pretender, a crank. They asserted she was too naïve to be a United States Senator, that she would be powerless without the organization of a political party, that she would flounder in the seas of power as would the interests of New York State.

But curious things happened when newspapers attacked Mrs. Schmiegal. The attack editorials themselves appeared to be poorly edited. The newspapers' computerized typesetting programs seemed to have a mind of their own, notwithstanding the best efforts of the newspapers' production staffs. In the final days leading up to the election, the spelling in the anti-Schmiegal editorials was consistently atrocious, even though their computerized dictionary programs confirmed everything was spelled correctly. The grammar and syntax were equally awful. It was almost self-parody. Every editorial that slammed Dora Schmiegal had so many spelling and punctuation errors that it was painful to read them. The editorials read as though they had been written by illiterates.

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